Skidmore College will be a smoke-free and tobacco-free campus, effective Jan. 1, 2019. Smoking and tobacco use — as well as the use of all e-cigarettes and vaping devices — will be prohibited throughout all Skidmore College property, including outdoor areas.

The Skidmore College community has again joined together to collect more than $13,000, 4,000 food items and over 1,000 school supplies and personal care items to support nonprofit organizations through the Skidmore Cares community service program.

Passion mashup: Juleyka Lantigua-Williams ’96

Juleyka Lantigua-Williams ’96, a journalism entrepreneur, says that Skidmore taught
her “to think and discern, to dismiss platitudes and to question authority.”

by Sue Rosenberg & Helen S. Edelman ’74

Journalism entrepreneur

“I was a government major who loved her genetics class and was on the construction
team for the theater company,” recalls Juleyka Lantigua-Williams ’96. She went into
print journalism, but now she’s an entrepreneur who helps disseminate wide perspectives
in podcasts.

Having moved from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. with her family when she was
10, Lantigua-Williams grew up in the Bronx during the crack-cocaine epidemic of the
1980s (“I witnessed my neighbors being devastated by it”) and earned Opportunity Program
funding to attend Skidmore when she was just 16.

Here, she says, “I practiced doing things that were way out of my wheelhouse, and
I received support while taking great risks.” That same “why not me?” approach has
shaped her career ever after.

A government and Spanish double major, she had law school in mind. But a law-firm
job working 16-hour days in a windowless office and researching “obscure environmental
laws that corporate clients could use to eschew their due diligence” spurred a big
life reassessment.

With poets and journalists among her forebears, she had always wanted to write, and
during a Fulbright fellowship in Spain after her senior year, she helped launch a
newspaper and a journal focused on immigrants there. So then she decides to earn a
master’s in journalism and become a reporter and editor at Urban Latino, the Atlantic,
NPR and other media outlets.

Lantigua-Williams found her Skidmore education was “the perfect foundation for a journalist,
who has to assimilate all types of information in many formats and who has to translate
and present complex ideas in a limited space.”

Most important and useful across the board, she says,

At Skidmore I learned to think and discern, to dismiss platitudes and to question
authority.”

Armed with those skills, “I’m not afraid to make mistakes,” she declares, “so I take
risks all the time.”

Last year her savvy and pluck paid off once again when she left traditional journalism
to start her own company. As the lantiguawilliams.co website describes it, “We create
audio and video experiences that stay with you long after the credits, using digital
tools and original storytelling techniques.”

One goal is to open media to more people of color, “whose perspectives and skills
are vital” to American society, she says.

For her, “Storytelling is the only true universal language. As we become more fragmented
economically, socially and culturally, it is storytelling that will help close the
gaps between subcultures and subgroups.”

Just weeks after the launch, Lantigua-Williams took yet another flyer, applying for
a grant from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation. Sure enough, she won funding to
pursue what she calls her most ambitious work ever.

Titled “70 Million,” it’s a series of 30-minute podcasts exploring incarceration and
criminal justice in the U.S.; as executive producer, she’s working with independent
radio journalists, editors and others.

Despite her prior career acrobatics, Lantigua-Williams confides that becoming a “solopreneur”
felt like a huge leap. “But a year later,” she says, “I could not be happier or feel
more fulfilled by my work.”

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